Tuvia Ruebner, winner of Israel Prize for Poetry (2008), is a Hebrew poet who lost his family in the Holocaust. He turned his personal trauma into a broad world view that engages with Western culture, his poetry highlighting correspondences with paintings by Chagall, Bruegel, Holbein, Turner and Rembrandt.
Death and loss are molding experiences in this poet’s world. Paintings and sculpture masterpieces are signaled as masks, as Ambassadors of Death. Ruebner’s poems enable us to examine the tradition of various forms of artistic representation, while addressing the experience of art in a century when God ‘hid his face’ from the fate of European Jewry. And as Shahar Bram discovers and elaborates, herein lies an exquisite example of the use of ekphrasis – Ruebner using his poetic language medium to explain and process the meaning and messages inherent in a select group of paintings and sculptures of cultural significance.
This important book contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of “word and image”, and the history of the relationships between “sister arts”. This is not only a unique perspective of traditional Western art form as reflected in the eyes of a Hebrew survivor of twentieth-century Holocaust atrocities, but, in the words of Ruskin, it is “the expression of one soul [one artistic form] talking to another”. The result is a profound understanding of the central principles of word and image art forms.
Death and loss are molding experiences in this poet’s world. Paintings and sculpture masterpieces are signaled as masks, as Ambassadors of Death. Ruebner’s poems enable us to examine the tradition of various forms of artistic representation, while addressing the experience of art in a century when God ‘hid his face’ from the fate of European Jewry. And as Shahar Bram discovers and elaborates, herein lies an exquisite example of the use of ekphrasis – Ruebner using his poetic language medium to explain and process the meaning and messages inherent in a select group of paintings and sculptures of cultural significance.
This important book contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of “word and image”, and the history of the relationships between “sister arts”. This is not only a unique perspective of traditional Western art form as reflected in the eyes of a Hebrew survivor of twentieth-century Holocaust atrocities, but, in the words of Ruskin, it is “the expression of one soul [one artistic form] talking to another”. The result is a profound understanding of the central principles of word and image art forms.
Through a detailed and thoughtful study of the impact of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy on Olson’s aesthetic theory, this book points out the conceptual unity underlying what seems to be a sprawl of fragments in Olson’s major work, The Maximus Poems.
The poetics that Olson develops expressed a total weltanschauung, which was influenced by two major sources. Others have called attention to Olson’s use of Whitehead, but no critic has systematically analyzed the specific ways in which Whitehead’s thought, mainly as presented in Process and Reality (1929), served as a structural model for Olson’s poetry. Whitehead’s philosophy functions as a net through which not only modern science enters the work of Olson, but also the mythopoeia of an ancient, “primitive” world, the second source influencing Olson, as is manifested in various texts from different cultures, times, and places. Thus Whitehead offered Olson a way to combine a scientific and mythopoeic view of time and space. From this Olson constructed a poetics that could renew human contact with the external world and rid poetry of, in Olson’s words, “the individual ego, the subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption which western man has interposed between what he is as a creature…and those other creations of nature, which we may…call objects.”
Explicating this philosophical fundament of Olson’s poetry, the discussion turns out to be an extensive analysis of the generic question of The Long Poem. The Long Poem as a process, as the act of the organism and as an organism per se, as a real event in the world, as a ritual and story, as multiplicity within unity - all these terms rely on foundations anchored in Whitehead’s philosophy and in mythopoeic patterns of thinking. The author uses Olson’s philosophical investment in Whitehead in order to explain not only the content of Olson’s verse, but its formal, structural elements. Olson’s poetics of the Long Poem is based on openness at the micro level, while suspending the narrative and unified perspective of the poem at the macro level. The transition between micro and macro allows the integration of openness and determinism, suspension and fluency, spatial and temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity.
On the one hand, concrete poetic units of the Maximus Poems serve as a starting point for clarifying how different elements are joined together in one unity. On the other hand, the book traces the blending of the whole poem at the macro level, following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves from one poetic unit to the next; that is, from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Thus the book illuminates Olson’s theory of the Long Poem as an “all-containing” corpus, governed by metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems.
The poetics that Olson develops expressed a total weltanschauung, which was influenced by two major sources. Others have called attention to Olson’s use of Whitehead, but no critic has systematically analyzed the specific ways in which Whitehead’s thought, mainly as presented in Process and Reality (1929), served as a structural model for Olson’s poetry. Whitehead’s philosophy functions as a net through which not only modern science enters the work of Olson, but also the mythopoeia of an ancient, “primitive” world, the second source influencing Olson, as is manifested in various texts from different cultures, times, and places. Thus Whitehead offered Olson a way to combine a scientific and mythopoeic view of time and space. From this Olson constructed a poetics that could renew human contact with the external world and rid poetry of, in Olson’s words, “the individual ego, the subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption which western man has interposed between what he is as a creature…and those other creations of nature, which we may…call objects.”
Explicating this philosophical fundament of Olson’s poetry, the discussion turns out to be an extensive analysis of the generic question of The Long Poem. The Long Poem as a process, as the act of the organism and as an organism per se, as a real event in the world, as a ritual and story, as multiplicity within unity - all these terms rely on foundations anchored in Whitehead’s philosophy and in mythopoeic patterns of thinking. The author uses Olson’s philosophical investment in Whitehead in order to explain not only the content of Olson’s verse, but its formal, structural elements. Olson’s poetics of the Long Poem is based on openness at the micro level, while suspending the narrative and unified perspective of the poem at the macro level. The transition between micro and macro allows the integration of openness and determinism, suspension and fluency, spatial and temporal patterns of thinking, multiplicity in unity.
On the one hand, concrete poetic units of the Maximus Poems serve as a starting point for clarifying how different elements are joined together in one unity. On the other hand, the book traces the blending of the whole poem at the macro level, following its course through a temporal progress in which the poem moves from one poetic unit to the next; that is, from a unity (of multiplicity) to a new unity (in which the previous unity is already part of the multiplicity building the new one). Thus the book illuminates Olson’s theory of the Long Poem as an “all-containing” corpus, governed by metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems.